The Church

Latter-day Saints have always believed that general conference is more than an institutional meeting. It is the appointed time when the Lord speaks to His Church through living prophets. We sustain fifteen men as prophets, seers, and revelators precisely because we believe revelation did not end with the Bible, or with Joseph Smith, or with any generation since.

But if that is true — if conference really is revelation delivered in real time — then we should expect to see something specific in the conference record. We should expect the emphasis of conference to change from conference to conference. Not the doctrine, which is unchanging, but the particular counsel the Lord chooses to give His people in a given season. 

Does the record show that pattern? To find out, every general conference talk delivered between April 1971 and April 2026 was analyzed — 111 conferences, more than 4,000 talks, and over 20,000 individual topic references identified and scored. For each conference, we identified the themes that stood out most — not simply by how often they appeared, but by how much more heavily they were emphasized than across the rest of the fifty-five-year record.

That distinction matters. Jesus Christ, for instance, is discussed in every conference — so heavily and so consistently that a simple frequency count would place Him among the top five themes in every conference, telling us little about what made any particular conference distinctive. This analysis looks past that baseline to find what actually set each conference apart: which topics rose well above their usual presence, showing a particular emphasis rather than being a constant of conference itself. As an example, the table below shows the five most significant themes — by this measure — from April 2025, April 2020, April 2015, and April 2010.

What Never Changed

Before examining what shifted, it is worth noting what did not. Across every single decade in the record, Jesus Christ and His Atonement remain central themes of general conference. In the 1970s and in the 2020s alike, in years of prosperity and years of crisis, the Savior is the constant.

This is precisely what we should expect. The Lord declared, “I am the same yesterday, today, and forever” (1 Nephi 10:18). If conference emphasis shifted arbitrarily — if the Church chased whatever topic was culturally convenient — we would expect the center to drift. It has not. The foundation remains solid.

What has changed is how much that center is emphasized. In conferences since 2020, “Jesus Christ” ranks among the most significant themes roughly six times out of ten — double its rate in the 2010s, and far above earlier decades. The Savior was always there. But in the current generation, the Lord has moved His servants to say His name more plainly, more often, and more insistently than at any time in the past fifty years. The following chart shows how the emphasis scores have changed over time.¹

Those who were living in August 2018 will remember at least one of the reasons for this increased emphasis. President Russell M. Nelson announced that the Lord had “impressed upon my mind the importance of the name He has revealed for His Church” — and called upon members to abandon nicknames and use the Savior’s name in full. The conference data shows that this was not just a branding decision. It was a course correction that reverberated through the teaching of the entire Church, measurable within a single year.

The Era of Duty: 1971–1989

The conferences in the 1970s and 1980s have a distinct voice. Their most prominent themes are commandments, obedience, honesty, integrity, and morality. In the 1970s alone, “commandments” ranks among the top themes in nearly 30 percent of conferences — a rate never approached in any decade since.

This was the era of President Spencer W. Kimball’s call to “lengthen your stride,” of a Church growing rapidly into new nations and needing clear, teachable standards for converts and youth alike. The “For the Strength of Youth” pamphlet of that period was explicitly behavioral, offering specific direction on dress, dating, and conduct.

We should not read this as a lesser or more primitive gospel. It was the gospel the Saints of that moment needed. A rapidly expanding Church, absorbing converts by the hundreds of thousands, required firm footing in basic obedience before it could be asked for more. The Lord teaches as any wise teacher does: foundations first.

The Turn Toward the Family: 1990–2009

By the 1990s, the emphasis had shifted. Themes of family, family history, temple work, and personal devotion rose to prominence. This was the era of President Gordon B. Hinckley’s extraordinary temple-building program, which placed temples within reach of Saints around the world for the first time.

It was also the era of “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” issued in 1995 by the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve. Read in hindsight, the timing of that document is difficult to regard as coincidental. It was published before the cultural debates over marriage and family reached their height — not in reaction to them, but in advance of them. The Lord prepared His Saints with a clear declaration of doctrine before the storm arrived, not after.

Following the release of the declaration, “family” resurfaced repeatedly as a top-ranked theme in the years that followed — most strikingly in April 1998, when it became the single most distinctive theme of the entire conference.

The Covenant Path: 2010–Present

The most dramatic shift in the entire fifty-five-year period has occurred since 2010, and it is not subtle.

Two phrases that rarely appeared earlier— “covenant path” and “gathering of Israel” — first emerge and then surge. “Covenant path” was effectively absent from the top themes in every decade before 2010.² In the 2010s it appeared in 20 percent of conferences. In the 2020s it appears as a top theme in nearly 85 percent — more than four conferences in five. The theme “Gathering of Israel” tripled over the same time span.

This is not a gradual drift. It is a sharp, identifiable turn, and it began within months of President Nelson assuming leadership of the Church in January 2018.

Consider what accompanied it. In April 2018, the Lord’s servants replaced home teaching and visiting teaching — programs that had shaped Latter-day Saint life for generations — with ministering. Later that year, in the October conference, the Church announced “Come, Follow Me,” shifting gospel instruction from the meetinghouse to the home and shortening Sunday meetings accordingly. Both changes pointed the same direction: toward personal covenant responsibility rather than institutional direction.

Then came 2020. Within eighteen months of the announcement that the home would become the center of gospel learning, chapels across the world closed. A global pandemic shut down public worship on every continent. Saints who had been given a home-centered curriculum — and who had been taught for two years to understand themselves as covenant people rather than merely meeting-attenders — found they had exactly what they needed.

It is possible to call that timing fortunate. Saints have another word for it.

The Pattern Behind the Data

What emerges from 111 conferences is not a Church changing its mind. It is a Church being prepared through revelation.

Each era’s emphasis answers the need of the era that followed, often before that need was visible:

• Obedience and standards were taught to a Church absorbing unprecedented growth, giving new Saints firm ground to stand on.
• Family doctrine and temple access were declared and expanded before the world’s understanding of family began to fracture.
• Covenant identity and home-centered worship were established immediately before the pandemic kept the Saints from worshiping in their chapels.

Amos wrote that the Lord “will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets” (Amos 3:7). The conference record of the last fifty-five years reads like a long, patient application of that promise. The doctrine never moved. The Savior remained at the center in every decade without exception. But the counsel — the specific, practical, urgent counsel — shifted again and again, and in nearly every case it shifted early.

What This Means for Us

This analysis suggests that general conference is much more than a time to hear sound advice or learn about the Church’s priorities. It is an opportunity for each of us to receive the revelation we need for our own lives.  The emphasis often changes with each conference.

We’ve been taught again and again that one of the purposes of this dispensation is to prepare the world for the Savior’s Second Coming. General conference is one of the important ways the Lord prepares us. It helps us understand what He is asking of us now and, just as importantly, preparing us for what is still ahead.

So, as we listen to general conference, we should ask ourselves a slightly different question. Not just, “What am I supposed to do?” but, “What is the Lord preparing me for?”

We may not know the answer right away. We may not even recognize the preparation until much later.

But the Lord is always preparing His people for the road ahead.

The data showing the top ten topics for each conference is available at searchgeneralconference.com

Footnotes

1. The emphasis score measures how central a theme was to a given conference, relative to that conference’s own most significant topic, which is always set to 100%. Behind that percentage is a calculation that weighs how strongly a topic scored when it appeared, how many talks touched on it, and how much more (or less) common it was in that conference than in general conference as a whole. A theme near 100% was that conference’s leading topic; a theme near 0% was barely present at all, even if it came up once or twice in passing.

2. The phrase “covenant path” was coined in Jeffrey R. Holland’s 2006 Ensign article  What I Wish Every New Member Knew—and Every Longtime Member Remembered  The first mention of “covenant path” in General Conference was in Elaine S. Dalton’s April 2007 talk Stay on the Path where she quoted Elder Holland’s Ensign article.